Are You Ready For “The Twelve” By Justin Cronin?

The Twelve, a sequel to Justin Cronin’s The Passage, is set for an October 16 release date.

With almost a month before the release, if you are not familiar with The Passage, the most talked about and hyped book of Summer 2010, you better be a fast reader! This epic-trilogy is massive.

Justin Cronin is an award-winning writer and a professor of English at Rice University and yet this wasn’t enough to save him from the vampire craze. But be aware, this is not the type of the story, where the charismatic, handsome vampire fallen in-love with the innocent girl, you are used to read. Not at all! “This is a mixture of Stephen King’s “The Stand” and “Salem’s Lot” in that lab at Jurassic Park, with rich infusions of Robert McCammon’s “Swan Song”, “Battlestar Galactica” and even Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”” says the infamous Book Critic Ron Charles. So it is!

Without taking the excitement from you and giving away too much, The Passage begins a few years in the future, with a secret scientific-military experiment on a virus, extracted from Bolivian bats, that was supposed to give eternal life, and super strength. The last 12 test subjects are death row inmates. Yeh – just the type of person you would want to be immortal and super strong. And of course, it has gone all wrong and the destruction of the world begins.

The first part of the book is a very detailed and slow story-building with a set of characters. The second part of the book, picks up about a century later, in a set of the post-apocalyptic world, after the release of the virus. The action is fast and violent, which really makes you want to run for the hills.

The Passage is not all perfect; there are of course a few cliches in the book. But what makes this book really good is that with Cronin’s talent to terrify the reader, you will not notice these flaws.

The film rights of the book were already sold to Ridley Scott’s, Scott Free Productions for $1,75 million USD long before the release, and John Logan, writer of The Gladiator, is already writing the script.

Are you dying to get your hands on The Twelve? Leave your comments below!